Illustration: Lu Ting/GT

The Shanghai Greenery and Public Sanitation Bureau recently announced that the city's garbage sorting pilot program will be extended from the current number of about 2.05 million households to a further 400,000 houses this year. Meanwhile, 2,000 more waste recycling centers will be built across the city by the end of 2014.

The bureau also issued a warning that from next month, anyone involved in the scheme could face a fine if they fail to properly sort their waste. According to the official guidelines, individuals can be fined from 50 yuan ($8.02) up to 200 yuan, while businesses may face fines of between 100 yuan and 1,000 yuan for failing to sort their garbage.

Although officials with the city government's legislative affairs office stated that they will aim to use education rather than punishment to push forward the scheme in its early days, they will still have the option to issue fines later.

It is sensible to promote the city's waste sorting program through a combination of education rather than the use of punitive actions. The latter have been used excessively in some other public schemes in Shanghai, with little effect.

A survey carried out by the Shanghai Municipal Statistics Bureau last November suggested that most Shanghai residents were willing to sort their domestic waste despite the fact that many remained unclear about precisely how they were supposed to go about doing this.

The city's current waste sorting program divides domestic garbage into four categories - wet waste, dry waste, recyclable materials and harmful items.

The bureau polled 2,000 householders, 200 cleaners and 100 neighborhood committee staff members in Shanghai. Over 95 percent of them were supportive of the scheme as they believed garbage sorting would be good for the environment.

Yet, while 26 percent of the respondents said they "always" sorted their garbage and nearly 60 percent of people said they did so "most of the time," the study still showed a large difference in how people classified and sorted garbage, particularly when it came to what constitutes "wet" and "dry" waste.

Given this lack of clarity, local authorities should step up efforts to educate people with regards to waste sorting.

An inspirational case study is provided by Hong Kong. Like many developed metropolises, Hong Kong has seen its waste grow as its economy has boomed. This means Hong Kong is rapidly running out of landfill space, with existing sites expected to be exhausted by 2020.

Accordingly, over the past decade the special administrative region government has launched a series of programs and devised a string of solutions concerning waste generation, reduction, management and disposal to tackle the problem.

For example, the Programme on Source Separation of Domestic Waste was launched in January 2005 to encourage waste recycling. It started a sucessful trial program in 2004 that reached 37,000 households and 120,000 people in 13 housing estates in Eastern District. Some of the participating housing estates more than doubled the quantity of recyclables they recovered.

The program helps property management companies in providing waste separation facilities on each floor of each residential building. Each participating housing estate can also organize regular collection programs of recyclable materials and sell them to recyclers.

Residents in the program can also bring their recyclable materials to different locations in their communities, as well as to the city's recycling organizations. There is also a recycling helpline that provides information on waste reduction and recycling.